Human beings think in stories. And a good story has a villain. An underwhelming and poorly managed game with an odd business model is a boring story. An evil scam stealing thousands of dollars from people is a great story. The fact that you can get the ships for free and some people think doing so is fun counteracts the narrative, so it’s dismissed.
Anyway, here’s my story for the haters to dismiss. I spent 35 dollars on the cheapest ship and played around in the game because a streamer I like said it was worth checking out if you’re interested in seeing an unfinished game get made. I thought it was neat. I had wander around and enjoyed the public transit systems on the planets. The terrestrial locations were intersesting. Then I hopped in my ship and did some missions. I tried cargo delivery, which involved flying around and travelling and landing, and it was cool but it got boring quick. I also tried fighting some pirates, and it seemed more lucrative and interesting but I didn’t have a very good ship for combat and I was bored of how long it takes to get to where the pirates are. I did them long enough to figure out how profitable it was, and realised I could get a better ship without that much trouble, but I’d get pretty bored, and at that point the inventory system was very buggy and everyone’s money got reset pretty frequently so it wasn’t something I wanted to prioritise.
So instead I started hanging out with streamers in the game. It was a pretty fun time because when I was around lots of other players, I could explore their ships. Some of the mid-size ships looked really fun. Think flying the Millenium Falcon around with your friends fighting space pirates, that’s the fantasy. I also realised I could buy a hoverbike and go zooming around the planets, and that was cool. I got to explore the Hammerhead and the 890 jump, which were really cool. Those are the ships that cost a thousand dollars. The hammerhead is a military ship and it’s labyrinthine. Full of pipes and Jefferies’ tubes and gun emplacements. It felt like being on board a Star Destroyer crossed with Serenity. I didn’t even get a sense for the layout of the ship in the half hour I spent on it. The 890 jump is a luxury cruise ship. I got to explore that one extensively, and it was really cool. There’s cabins, a bar, a pool, and even laundry rooms and kitchens for the guests. That’s where the money for this game is actually going, it’s going into doing literal architecture on these ships to make them as realistic and interesting as possible. They’re hiring architects instead of programmers. And you know what? That’s okay. Architecture geeks deserve fun games too, it doesn’t have to be all first person shooters and platformers. The terrestrial environments are the same story as the ships, they’re creating immersive and realistic environments where you can actually believe people live. Can you do anything interesting in these environments? No. But the environments themselves are interesting, so the architects are doing their jobs.